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Focusing on the positive, there's apparently food and water requirements which is a nice touch. Water is basically a weak healing potion, but most of it you find is irradiated to different degrees. The dialog screens are supposed to be like the talking heads from FO1/2. Weapons break down or are destroyed a lot (so weapons will for the most part be jury rigged or makeshift?). "Most of your experience comes from quests -- grinding for experience just isn't that useful."

The non-combat and non-graphic parts look ok, tho'. Multiple endings, branching quests, choice and consequence, specifically putting off that last point against Oblivion. Not horrible, there.

They're making all the right noises as far as the above is concerned, but aren't you wondering why none of that made it into Oblivion?

It seems strange to me, they talk about characters which interact with each other in a meaningful way, or many different branching sub-quests where one branch may affect which other branches are made available, but surely they wanted something like this in Oblivion? Or did their design specification for that particular game say "generic quest system" or "give no substantial meaning to sub-plots", or even "no consequences to player choices".

In fact, I'm almost sure this is the kind of language I was hearing before Oblivion was released. They discuss lots of wonderful ideas but the reality is often far from the hype. Maybe they just didn't get around to it in Oblivion being more concerned with the awshum graphikz.